// November 5th, 2005 // No Comments » // All, Articles
Talk turned today to my impressions of that ghastly film bride and prejudice (on which I wrote a particularly vitriolic write up as I foamed at the mouth having wasted a hard earned 5 quid on the film) this was just one of coincidences that happens, unconnected I am sure to the fact that The Friday Times published a rather late film review, which to my considerable disgust manages to explain away the films monstrous failings under the guise of something about Bollywood being Bollywood.
I am also currently reading Salman Rushdies midnights children which after many misses with the likes of Kamila Shamise is one of the few books by a desi author I find inspiring. I need not add that the book, or atleast what Ive read of it is a tour de force of inspired, and deeply imaginative writing.
My excitement for a newly discovered desi writer I admire is tempered by todays reading of the stinging review of Shalimar the Clown (Rushdies latest book) in the New York Times book review; it seems Rushdie may have lost the touch, lazily crafting single faceted characters cast in premature plots. Shame, for as far as Midnights children goes, the writing is nothing if not captivatingly brilliant.
These many diverse threads seems to flow into a seemingly irrelevant article by William Dalrymple, titled unenlightening the lost sub-continent (Observer, August 13, 2005) as I read through it, funny how I realize it to be a confluence of ideas I so sure Ive almost toyed with sub-consciously over the last couple of days.
Take Kamila Shamsie, a rather pedestrial author if you ask me (who, for the purposes of this post stands in for all the myriad similar clones celebrated as ‘writers’) and yet, she and others of her elk are celebrated as writes even while they piggybacking either the chutnification phenomenon (to borrow Rushdies expression) or indeed our hunger to immerse ourselves in stories from home. My invective is put more elegantly in the article itself:
writer and critic Pankaj Mishra has attacked what he called the “slickly exilic version of India”, manufactured by a “cosmopolitan Third World elite … suffused with nostalgia, interwoven with myth, and often weighed down with a kind of intellectual simplicity foreign readers are rarely equipped to notice”.
So why bride and prejudice then?
The movie is more than just a badly written, anemically plotted absurdity, it is a manifestation of this very sort of scrubbed, romantic flights of fancy that come about from skewed perceptions of what living in the sub-continent is really about. Cloying visions of India/Pakistan are all very well, but when we start believing them to be true or even worse, dumb down artistic expression to worthless baubelized trinkets, Mishras indictment for intellectual simplicity seems to hit home. There is no other explanation for why preposterously bad literature, such as that penned by Shamsie should succeed.
Turning to a thread touched upon in the article, I cant help but wonder how we so can readily accept English writing by homegrown authors (who, as we find flee the coop as soon as possible) as our own ironically, since most of this is written with an eye to the west at any rate. I think its one of those everyday exceptional things that you kind of never realize is rather unusual. It would be hard to imagine, for example this kind of sentiment in any other part of the world for literature that is written in a language and cultural context so at odds to its own.
But then this post-colonial stake that the sub-continent retains in the English language means English is considered as much a local language as Urdu or Hindi. For the educated middle class that generally begets these authors, perhaps even more so. When these authors work dal recipies into books with a mind to boost sales in sub-urban waterstones, the castigation as a sell out, de-ethnicised desi now seems understandable in context. And herein i think lies the explanation of why they are treated so different from Hemmingway. Where they share a language, the two milieus are also diametrically apposed; its in many ways a mutually exclusive constraint that writers from other English speaking countries such as Australia dont have to face.
On the whole the article Dalrymple is arresting if meandering; he brings a perspective few other firgangi authors can match, immersed as he is in the ways of the sub-continent; his mention in passing to Dehli ki Akhri Shama, just the sort random aside he can draw upon to make his writing so much more interesting.
The footnote mentions white mughals Dalrymples latest book is to be brought to the stage. Many were unable to push through the book (admittedly it made for some rather heavy going every now and then) hopefully theatre will make the fascinating story he narrates more widely heard. In the current din of clash of civilizations, it would be illuminating to hear an account of people who agreed that at the end of the day, we are more similar that dissimilar.